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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23542429">Up in the Shore</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/hibouxx/pseuds/hibouxx'>hibouxx</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>NCT (Band)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Domestic, Falling In Love, Fluff, M/M, Red haired Yuta, Soft Jaehyun, Yuta as Ariel, mermaid!au</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 15:49:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,879</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23542429</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/hibouxx/pseuds/hibouxx</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jaehyun realises two things, one) Yuta is taking up more space in bed that he should and two) he has a tail. Nearly two metres long, scaly tail that’s somehow gotten entangled with the sheets.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Nakamoto Yuta</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>170</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Up in the Shore</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The YuJae mermaid!AU nobody asked for. Please excuse any mistakes for now! I'll get around to editing it once I have enough sleep. Quarantine has completely messed up my body clock ;n;</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fiery red and bright, are the first words Jaehyun remembers thinking when he meets Yuta for the first time. The young man with a smile that almost looks unreal, his mouth the shape of a heart and dangly earrings twinkling with the smallest movements. The beautiful stranger, with his bright red hair pulled back in a ponytail, has his hands around a can of convenience store beer, looking at the crowd of festival-goers like it’s the most fascinating thing in the world. It makes Jaehyun smile in return, to which he gets called out for by Doyoung.</p><p>“Why don’t you go talk to him?” Doyoung urges and Johnny backs him up. There’s no question that the man is alone, he’s been sitting in the same curb for almost an hour, he isn’t even drinking. Jaehyun is almost sure his beer is now lukewarm.</p><p>The festival takes place once a year in Busan, Jaehyun and his friends have never missed attending since they finished high school and Taeil got his driver’s license. This year’s venue is at Haeundae and there’s not a single inch of beach that’s not occupied. Yet, the man stands out even as he does nothing, tucked away in the farthest section from the stage where the crowd is the least wild. It so happens that Taeil is currently violently hurling from too much soju and Jaehyun has to look at something that isn’t vomit, and that’s how he spots Yuta, glowing under the harsh strobe lights.</p><p>He does end up talking to him, gets his name, a smile directed at him (which is a lot more powerful up close), and a compliment for his dimples. “You’re really pretty.” Jaehyun says in one breath, already a little tipsy and only once he’s sure his friends are out of earshot. Yuta chuckles in response, twirling a lose strand of red hair between his fingers, “Thank you, you are too.”</p><p>They do end up leaving the festival earlier, finding themselves in Jaehyun’s private hotel room locked in each other’s arms. Yuta spills a bit of his beer (which he insisted on taking) on Jaehyun’s t-shirt but that hardly matters when it comes off moments later. Despite being slightly inebriated and the fact that they’re jumping into bed not even a day after meeting each other, Jaehyun has the presence of mind to get to know Yuta in between kisses. Under the dim hotel room lighting, the red head’s eyes glow grey, definitely contacts, and his fingers are delicately nimble as they dispose Jaehyun of his jeans and boxers. Yuta kisses full of teeth, nibbling on Jaehyun’s already swollen lips every chance he gets.</p><p>There’s a certain charm to Yuta that Jaehyun has never seen on anyone before. He thinks it’s the mysteriously beautiful smile, the long red hair, or perhaps the incredibly round eyes. Either way, he thinks Yuta’s gorgeous and he may be in deeper than he initially thought.</p><p>Jaehyun runs his fingers over the dips of Yuta’s waists and down his wide hips, drinking in smooth skin and the hushed giggles as Yuta shies away from his touch, a tad ticklish. The glint of a belly button piercing catches his attention. There’s definitely no going back for Jaehyun.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Fiery red and bright, are the first words that come to mind as soon as he opens his eyes the next day, bright sunlight filtering through the gaps between the curtains. Yuta’s long hair is in Jaehyun’s face, some in his mouth, as the slighter man jostled the bed with his panicked movements.</p><p>“Jaehyun…” He calls out softly in dismay and it pulls Jaehyun straight out of whatever post-bliss stupor he’s in. He realises two things, one) Yuta is taking up more space in bed that he should and two) he has a tail. Nearly two metres long, scaly tail that’s somehow gotten entangled with the sheets. “I need to be in water, please.” his bedmate pleads, all glassy-eyed. Jaehyun jumps to his feet at once, thanking his regular weight training for being able to haul the entire merman off the bed and into the hotel tub without his knees buckling. He confirms that the tail is as real as it can get once they’re under the bathroom lighting and the tub has filled with enough water to submerge the humongous appendage. The scales take on a multitude of hues underwater, speckled with a bit of gold and blue at certain angles.</p><p>Jaehyun sits on the floor next to the tub, no longer caring about hygiene. Yuta avoids his gaze, clearly from shame.</p><p>“So you’re…uhhh…” Jaehyun says, unsure where to start. Yuta seems to shrink at the sound of his voice so he does his best to sound more soothing and less judgemental, “a merman?”</p><p>“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to deceive you.” Yuta says, still facing away from Jaehyun. For some strange reason, Jaehyun wants nothing more than to have those big eyes on him, so he reaches out, cupping the merman’s face in his hands so he can no longer turn away from him.</p><p>“You didn’t. You’re still really pretty and nice. You just got a little more interesting, I guess.” The beginnings of a smile tugs on Yuta’s painfully plump lips and Jaehyun’s breath hitches. “But you aren’t going to permanently stay this way, right?”</p><p>Jaehyun does need to check out by eleven, and Johnny or Doyoung (because he’s sure Taeil is completely out cold still) will be checking on him any time now.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>It turns out Yuta is able to shift between his two forms at will, but his human form does take more energy to keep up, so there are moments when he’ll slip up, much like their first night together when certain activities left the merman exhausted to the point that he unknowingly shifted in his sleep. Jaehyun is just happy to know that he can have Yuta with two legs more often than he’d first assumed. The grey eyes turn out to be real too, which were very neat in Jaehyun’s very honest opinion.</p><p>Jaehyun returns to Seoul with his friends the day after the festival with Yuta’s number saved in his phone and the memory of his red hair tangled between Jaehyun’s fingers fresh in his mind. It stays with him even as he goes back to work and gets back to his usual routine like he didn’t just sleep with some mythical shapeshifting merman. Yuta visits Seoul not too long after, bringing with him a cooler full of fresh tuna and mackerel as he invades Jaehyun’s living space.</p><p>Yuta’s family is from Japan so Jaehyun somehow expects the other to whip out some next level sushi dish but instead, he gets an entire raw fish sloppily scaled, served to him on a plate. These are the times he forgets that yes, Yuta isn’t entirely human while another part of him falls even deeper at the other’s clumsy attempts at a normal relationship.</p><p>“So like, are you actually trying to court me?” Jaehyun finally addresses the elephant in the room, after he remedies their lunch, grilling the fish and serving it with steaming rice and aged kimchi to a starry-eyed Yuta.</p><p>“Is it…not working?” Yuta shyly asks and Jaehyun nearly evaporates with the surge of affection he feels at the moment, he settles for pulling the other for a brief kiss over the their food, cringing a little at the taste of fish and kimchi. Later on, Yuta asks to hold his hand while he introduces his now kind-of boyfriend to Kingdom, because Yuta needs to know how terrifying ancient zombies can be. It’s during this that the red head slips something smooth into his hand that later turns out to be a massive pearl that isn’t perfectly round but undeniably real. Jaehyun assumes it’s part of Yuta’s courtship. He does feel special receiving jewellery on their first unofficial date.</p><p>“Will you be my boyfriend?” The merman asks with all of his chest. He’s so beautiful that it physically hurts just looking at him, Jaehyun laments as he whispers a yes against the mop of bright red hair.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Johnny, Taeil and Doyoung meets Yuta again a few months after they started dating. The three hardly remembers Yuta, having had too much to drink the night of the festival and having not seen him the following day after Jaehyun rushed to get him out of the hotel for fear of him reverting to his merman form without adequate notice. They’re not entirely surprised with the fact that Jaehyun has been dating someone under their noses, mostly because Jaehyun has been pretty obvious about it, he’s just a little more tightlipped about the identity of his latest <em>exploit</em>, as his friends put it, than usual. They are surprised that it’s the red head they saw at the festival months prior.</p><p>Doyoung is a little bit enamoured with the amount of piercings adorning Yuta’s ears, and is taken aback at Yuta excitedly telling all three of them that he has one in his belly button too. Jaehyun doesn’t miss the way his friends’ faces colour at the information they definitely didn’t ask for. Despite their rocky introductions, Yuta quickly becomes a part of the group as his visits from Busan becomes more and more frequent. The merman explains that business has been bad at the bookstore he works at, so he’s been given more unpaid days off, which he opts to use to visit his boyfriend in Seoul. Jaehyun feels bad about Yuta making all the adjustments for them. Bus tickets certainly aren’t cheap. Yuta never fails to reassure him that he does it for himself, and he can always make more money by selling some of the pearls he gets from his scheduled deep sea ventures.</p><p>He learns more about Yuta each visit, one new detail more bizarre than the other, like how he likes cats despite the fact that they’re supposedly his natural enemies (<em>‘I’m not a fish, Jaehyun’</em> Yuta never fails to remind him).</p><p>On their first anniversary as a couple, Jaehyun asks Yuta to move in with him in his apartment in Seoul, to which the merman tearily nodded yes. Jaehyun’s apartment isn’t exactly big, it’s a one-bedroom unit with a decent size kitchen and a measly living room that hardly counts as a room, but he does have a tub he knows will come in handy for his less than average boyfriend.</p><p>“Our water and heating bills are through the roof again.” Jaehyun sighs around the toothpaste in his mouth. Yuta’s lounging in the tub, his massive, iridescent tail lazily splashing water onto the bathroom floor, some landing on Jaehyun’s person. Being in a long distance relationship with a merman is a completely different experience from living with one. Seoul offers nothing remotely similar to the spanning beaches of Busan and Han river is completely out of the question after Yuta saw The Host (at Jaehyun’s mistake), and also because, in Yuta’s words, the water is disgusting there. So on days when Yuta’s longing for a dip in the water and a chance to loosen his control over his real form, they turn to the tub.</p><p>“I can always take another shift at the coffee shop.” Yuta offers with a smile, always optimistic. Jaehyun feels bad about having to nag over something his boyfriend can’t really help. Yuta’s hair is much longer now, long enough that he can put it in a neat braid or a tiny bun. He has the latterat the moment and Jaehyun already feels the urge to tug it loose from and let it cascade down Yuta’s back.</p><p>“It’s fine. I like taking care of you.” Jaehyun says after he cleans the foam off his mouth. He approaches the tub while being careful not to slip on wet tiles, “say, what do you think of me dyeing my hair pink? To match yours maybe.” The sweetest of smiles bloom across Yuta’s face at the suggestion, already reaching out for Jaehyun’s hands.</p><p>“I’d love that.”</p><p>That’s how Jaehyun gets his pale pink hair, which surprisingly fits him, and even more surprisingly, doesn’t get him fired from work. No one wants to see a pink-haired corporate worker, so the change is one of the more riskier things Jaehyun has done in his life, other than being in a committed relationship with a non-human. Ever since Yuta’s been introduced into their lives, Johnny, Doyoung and Taeil have been vocal about their confusion at the way Yuta wears the exact same coloured contacts everyday and has religiously kept his hair the same shade of red without signs of fading or roots growing out. Jaehyun sometimes thinks they’re starting to be suspicious, but it’s hard to be suspicious of something you don’t entirely understand. Jaehyun can tell them the entire truth in one sitting and they will simply laugh off his story and probably ask him to get more sleep. So Jaehyun’s solution is to be in solidarity with his boyfriend, even if it’s just the hair.</p><p>Yuta seems to love it anyway, claiming the pink brings out the colour in Jaehyun’s otherwise pale skin and makes him look softer. Jaehyun is rewarded two consecutive nights of Yuta’s mouth around him after his nightly shower and a good make out session in the morning, over breakfast. Jaehyun’s hair quickly fades into an ugly colour and he’s forced to dye it back to black only a couple of weeks later, but the effect remains, if Yuta’s extra bit of clinginess is anything to go by.</p><p>“I love you.” The merman whispers against his lips when he comes back from the hairdresser’s with freshly dyed midnight hair, “it doesn’t matter if I’m different from everyone else. It only matters that I have you.” The shorter man continues, face buried in Jaehyun’s chest. The latter lets out a sigh of relief, interlacing their fingers. Yuta feels completely human like this, soft under his touch and warm like his favourite fleece blanket.</p><p>“I love you too.” He responds, truly meaning it.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Contrary to Jaehyun’s initial worries, life with Yuta has easily become one of the most least complicated things in his life. Yuta’s a merman, yes, but he’s also painfully, irrevocably in love with Jaehyun despite the risks his feelings pose against himself and his kind that it’s just plain stupid to overlook what they have in favour of being rational. So they choose to not worry about things that they probably should be worried about. They live out their daily lives as any other couples do, already so attuned with each other that even their fights only last for as long as Jaehyun can hold out (which is about an hour).</p><p>Before they know it, they’ve been together for almost three years. Yuta has gotten his first short haircut a few weeks before their third anniversary. While he decided to keep his long bangs, he got the sides shaved very close to the scalp. For once, he looks like just another guy with flashy hair rather than an ethereal being. Jaehyun doesn’t mind the new look but he also misses the feel of long hair around his fingers.</p><p>“Do I look more human like this?” He playfully asks Jaehyun who’s too busy trying to beat him in Mario Kart. Jaehyun regrets the day he introduced his boyfriend to the game since he hasn’t been able to break the red head’s winning streak.</p><p>“Why do you have to look more human? I like you either way.” He makes the statement in passing, but it seems to leave a deeper impression on Yuta, who loses his first game against Jaehyun. Jaehyun screams in victory while Yuta remains still beside him. Jaehyun’s not entirely convinced that it’s not from the shock of his unexpected lost.</p><p>“But I want you to be able to confidently love me, without worrying about what I am.” Yuta argues and Jaehyun sees his stormy grey eyes for the first time in weeks after the other has taken to wearing dark brown contacts.</p><p>“I’ve never worried. I love you for being you, not for anything else.” Yuta looks troubled for a moment, and Jaehyun doesn’t know where this sudden insecurity is stemming from but he has a hunch it’s something Yuta’s been bottling up throughout the years.</p><p>“You’re so kind, Jae. On that morning back at the hotel in Busan, I expected you to run away, to call me a monster…and yet you carried me to the tub and made sure I was okay. What did I do to deserve you?” The merman sinks into Jaehyun’s side as he lets the words out. Jaehyun wraps his arms around his boyfriend, enveloping the other in a comfortable embrace.</p><p>“No idea, just like how I still can’t fathom how I got so lucky with you.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>On the day of their anniversary, exactly three years since their fateful meeting in the crowded Haeundae, Jaehyun adopts a little calico kitten that promptly latches on to Yuta. The taller man makes jokes about how the kitten probably identifies Yuta’s smell as food, which earns him a much deserved punch before he’s pulled into a long drawn kiss, full of only the sweetest promises.</p>
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